THE TECHNOLOGY BLIND SPOT

In December 2025, the federal government granted Matthew McConaughey ownership of three words. Not a film, not a script. The sound. A trademark registration now covers the exact audio of McConaughey saying “Alright, alright, alright,” described down to the pitch of every syllable: the first two words dropping low then rising, the last word climbing higher still. His company, J.K. Livin Brands, filed the application in December 2023. Two years later, the trademark office agreed that when people hear those three words in that cadence, they think of one man.

Four months after that registration cleared, Taylor Swift’s team reached for the same tool. On April 25, 2026, TAS Rights Management filed applications covering two sounds, “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor,” plus a photograph of Swift on a pink stage with a pink guitar. In roughly six months, filing a trademark on a human voice moved from novelty to template.

The reflex is to file this under celebrity news. That reflex is wrong, and it will cost your clients money. Swift and McConaughey are not reacting to fame. They are converting a personal attribute into a registered, enforceable asset at the exact moment a stranger with a laptop can manufacture a convincing copy of a voice from a few seconds of audio. Voice cloning now takes about three seconds of source material and runs on consumer hardware; the sample comes from a voicemail greeting, a conference video, or one Instagram reel. Your clients have voices too. Some of them have built entire companies on a single face.

This is not the first time a personal attribute quietly became a tradeable asset. In 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association dropped its ban on athletes profiting from their name, image, and likeness, and within a year the most recognizable college athletes were signing seven-figure endorsement deals off nothing but who they were. Identity became inventory. What changed for college athletes by rule is now changing for everyone else by technology. The moment a machine can reproduce a voice or a face at scale, that voice and that face acquire the property that defines an asset: someone will pay to use them, or pay to fake them.

Here is the question that should reach a fourteen-attorney firm in Charlotte before it reaches the next awards stage. Not whether Taylor Swift can protect her brand; she can afford to protect anything. Whether the founder whose face sells your client’s supplement line, the executive whose voice answers every after-hours call, the orthodontist whose name is the practice, has learned that the thing the business runs on is now registrable, and that a competitor can register a confusingly similar version first.

What Trademark Actually Protects

Registering a sound is old law. The three NBC chimes have carried a federal registration, No. 916,522, for decades; the MGM lion’s roar holds Registration No. 1,395,550. In 1978, in In re General Electric Broadcasting Co., the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board established the standard that still governs: a sound qualifies for registration when it assumes a “definitive shape or arrangement” and creates in the hearer’s mind an association between the sound and its source, provided that the sound is arbitrary or distinctive rather than a commonplace beep. McConaughey’s three-note cadence clears that bar. So does a four-word greeting delivered in a voice tens of millions recognize.

Protecting a voice is not new either, and the person who proved it was not a lawyer. In 1985, Ford’s advertising agency asked Bette Midler to sing “Do You Want to Dance” for a Mercury Sable campaign. Midler declined. The agency hired one of her former backup singers and instructed her to sound exactly like Midler. The commercial ran, listeners believed they were hearing Midler herself, and in 1988 the Ninth Circuit held that Ford had taken something the law would protect. “The voice is as distinctive and personal as a face,” the court wrote in Midler v. Ford Motor Co. Four years later, the same court upheld a $2.6 million award to Tom Waits after Frito-Lay ran a Doritos spot voiced by a Waits imitator.

Those were lawsuits, filed after the harm, by performers whose voices already carried commercial value, under a state-law right of publicity. What Swift and McConaughey are testing is different in kind. They are registering the voice in advance, federally, as a trademark, so the asset exists on paper before anyone misuses it. Josh Gerben, the trademark attorney who first flagged Swift’s filing, put the novelty plainly: registering a celebrity’s spoken voice “is a new use of trademark registration that has not been tested in court before.” Kevin Yorn, McConaughey’s lawyer, was blunter about why they did it anyway. “We have to at least test this.”

The reason to register rather than wait is not vanity but machinery, because a federal registration under the Lanham Act carries a legal presumption that the mark is valid and belongs to the owner, opens the doors of federal court, and unlocks statutory remedies that a state-law publicity claim cannot reach. Section 43(a) of the same Act, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a), already allows a person to stop a false endorsement, meaning an advertisement that implies a celebrity backs a product when she has done no such thing. Swift has lived the harm that doctrine addresses. In January 2024, sexually explicit deepfake images of her spread across a single platform to tens of millions of views before it acted, and a fabricated endorsement circulated in her name during the campaign season. A registered mark is an attempt to arm the response before the next fake ships.

Registration is not automatic, and this is the first thing to tell a client. A trademark protects a voice or an image only when the owner uses it in commerce as a source identifier, the way a logo sits on a package. The founder whose face appears in every advertisement and on every label has a candidate for registration. The executive who merely has a recognizable voice, used nowhere as a brand, holds a right-of-publicity interest and little else. The filing question and the exposure question are not the same question. Separating them is exactly the judgment a client is paying for, and it is the reason this lands on a lawyer’s desk rather than a marketing consultant’s.

Where the Shield Stops

The strategy has a limit worth naming before a client hears the headline and assumes too much. A trademark protects a specific sound used as a source identifier in commerce. It is strong against a rival who runs an ad using “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” to imply an endorsement she never gave, because that use confuses consumers about where the product comes from. It is weak, close to useless, against the scam caller who clones a chief financial officer’s voice to authorize a wire transfer, because that fraud is not a use in commerce and it confuses no consumer about the source of any good. Trademark answers the impostor in the marketplace. It does not answer the impostor on the phone. [See The Voice on the Phone Was Not Your Client, The Technology Blind Spot (2026).]

But couldn’t a client simply sue after the fact, the way Midler did, and skip the filing fees? A client could try. The client would be starting from zero: no presumption of validity, no federal remedies bought in advance, and a voice a court might decide never carried enough commercial recognition to protect at all. Midler won because a jury believed the whole country knew her voice. The founder of a regional HVAC company enjoys no such presumption. Registration is the difference between owning the asset and arguing, mid-crisis, that the asset ever existed.

The gap trademark leaves is exactly the gap Congress is now moving to fill. On June 18, 2026, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the NO FAKES Act by unanimous voice vote, a bill that would create a federal right for every individual, celebrity or private citizen, to control digital replicas of their voice and visual likeness. Tennessee already built a state version, the ELVIS Act, which took effect on July 1, 2024. A federal replica right is now closer than it has ever been, and when it arrives, the clients who treated their voice as registrable property will be positioned to enforce it, while the clients who did not will be reading about it.

The Objection Worth Taking Seriously

Simon Tam has spent more time than almost anyone testing whether trademark rights mean what they claim. He is the musician who carried his band’s name, The Slants, to the Supreme Court and won in Matal v. Tam. He looked at the Swift and McConaughey filings and saw something less flattering than clever lawyering. Rights that exist in theory for everyone, he argues, become meaningful only for the people who can afford to use them. An owner earns a trademark through use and defends it through litigation, and both favor those who are already famous and already rich. A boutique’s client cannot outspend a deepfake operation running out of a jurisdiction that ignores American judgments. On the economics, Tam is correct.

Where the argument turns is on what a lawyer actually does with it. Tam’s observation is a reason not to rely on trademark registration alone; it is not a reason to leave a client uninformed that the option exists in the first place. His deeper complaint, that the law shields the powerful before it shields everyone, is precisely what the NO FAKES Act sets out to answer, by extending a replica right to the private citizen who will never file a trademark at all. The access gap is real. The response to it is not silence. The response is to raise the issue while the law is still forming, so the client makes a deliberate choice instead of inheriting a default written by whoever moves first.

The Question Runs Both Directions

There is a second exposure, and it is the one clients rarely see coming. A business that uses an AI-generated voice in its own advertising, its phone tree, or its product may be borrowing a sound someone else has registered, or violating a replica right that is about to exist. The competence question does not run only toward protecting the client’s voice; it runs equally toward the synthetic voice the client already deployed last quarter, cloned from a stock sample whose provenance no one bothered to verify. A cease-and-desist letter does not care that the infringement was convenient. [See The Deepfake Rule That Won’t Exist Until 2028, The Technology Blind Spot (2026).]

None of this requires a litigation partner to become a trademark prosecutor. It requires the duty the American Bar Association wrote into Comment 8 of Model Rule 1.1 in 2012: a lawyer must keep abreast of the benefits and risks of relevant technology. A client whose entire brand rides on one recognizable person now faces a benefit, registration, and a risk, replication. A lawyer who spots neither is the lawyer explaining next year why the competitor’s filing came first, or why the client’s own AI ad drew a demand letter from someone else’s counsel.

What To Do Before Thursday

Pick one client whose brand runs through a single identifiable person. The founder in every ad. The doctor whose recorded voice greets every caller. The executive who is, functionally, the logo. Ask one question about that client: is the voice or the face a registrable asset worth a federal filing, and has anyone raised it with them. If the answer is no, make the call. Not a memo, not a newsletter item. A call that names the asset, names the risk that a competitor or an AI ad reaches it first, and asks whether the client wants to protect it. Then ask the mirror question: is this client already using a synthetic voice in its own marketing, and does anyone know where that voice came from.

Alright, alright, alright. The federal government now agrees those three words belong to one man, priced to the pitch of each syllable. Your client will never draw McConaughey’s audience or Swift’s lawyers. But your client has three words, or one face, or a voice on a greeting, that a machine can copy by Friday and a rival can file on by Monday. The registration McConaughey made is not the lesson. The call you have not yet made, to the client who needs to make one of their own, is.

About the Author

JD Morris is Co-Founder and COO of LexAxiom, an Agentic AI platform for the business of law. Over a 25-year career, he has built and scaled enterprise technology products across Dell, EMC, VMware, and Cisco, including the first exabyte eDiscovery platform. He holds dual MBAs from Columbia Business School (Finance) and UC Berkeley Haas (Marketing), a Master of Legal Studies in Cybersecurity Law from Texas A&M, and a Master of Engineering from George Washington University. He writes The Technology Blind Spot on the intersection of emerging technology and law. Connect with him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/jdavidmorris, on X at @JDMorris_LTech, or on Bluesky at @JDMorris-ltech.bsky.social.

References

1. In re Gen. Elec. Broad. Co., 199 U.S.P.Q. 560 (T.T.A.B. 1978).

2. NBC Chimes, U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 916,522.

3. MGM Lion’s Roar, U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 1,395,550.

4. Midler v. Ford Motor Co., 849 F.2d 460 (9th Cir. 1988).

5. Waits v. Frito-Lay, Inc., 978 F.2d 1093 (9th Cir. 1992).

6. Lanham Act § 43(a), 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a) (2018).

7. Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. 218 (2017).

8. Model Rules of Pro. Conduct r. 1.1 cmt. 8 (Am. Bar Ass’n 2024).

9. NO FAKES Act of 2026, S. 4591, 119th Cong. (2026).

10. Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, 2024 Tenn. Pub. Acts ch. 1046 (codified as amended at Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 47-25-1101 to -1108 (2024)).

11. Angela Yang, Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Her Voice and Likeness in Era of AI Deepfakes, NBC News (Apr. 27, 2026), https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/taylor-swift-files-trademark-voice-likeness-protection-ai-deepfakes-rcna342367.

12. Todd Spangler, Matthew McConaughey Trademarks ‘Alright, Alright, Alright’ to Protect Against AI Misuse, Variety (Jan. 14, 2026), https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/matthew-mcconaughey-trademarks-alright-alright-alright-ai-misuse-1236631214/.

13. Senate Judiciary Committee Advances Legislation to Protect Name, Image, Likeness and Voice Against Unauthorized AI Use, Holland & Knight (June 2026), https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/06/senate-judiciary-committee-advances-legislation-to-protect-name.